Seven people were arrested in the Irish Republic on Tuesday over an alleged plot to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, Irish police said.

Al-Qaida put a $100,000 bounty on the head of cartoonist Lars Vilks after a newspaper published his cartoon in August 2007.

The four men and three women were detained in the south of the country after an investigation involving European security agencies and the United States' CIA and FBI, the U.K.-based Press Association reported.

The suspects were all Muslim, according to media reports, and the BBC reported that they ranged in age from their mid-20s to late-40s.

Irish Police said the arrests were part of an investigation into a "conspiracy to murder an individual in another jurisdiction."

'Slaughtered like a lamb'
In September 2007, the BBC reported that Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the supposed head of al-Qaida in Iraq, had said the reward would be increased by half if Vilks was "slaughtered like a lamb."

Ireland's RTE news network said that five were detained in Waterford and two others in Cork.